Why build yet another chat platform?

If we had a penny for every time we are asked this question, we probably wouldn't need our investors. To give you a one line pitch, Scrollback is an online chat platform for communities. Yes, there are many chatting tools available online and the same is true for community platforms. Then why build Scrollback?

Online communities exist because individuals relate and want to be a part of a larger group of people with similar backgrounds or with whom they share common interests or end goals. They want to be able to feel one with, reach out to or discuss with people who share their need or vision or passion.

A quick look at the online communities’ landscape today will tell you that communities are anchored by their strength to reach out to like-minded individuals and enable engagement and interaction among each other.

On one hand we have social media pages and groups. These channels have an impressive reach; they are a great platform for crowd sourcing information, promoting community events and of course targeting advertisements. Where else can you post ‘Looking for a good marketing tool,’ and get a hundred suggestions, including sales pitches and download links.

While these channels have great community reach, the discussions there are short lived. They rank really low in extended user engagement. It is easy to voice an opinion or make a comment or get suggestions but it is very difficult to have prolonged, engaging discussions on these platforms. In other words there is a lot of noise and very little conversation. When was the last time you spent an afternoon conversing with a fellow community member on your social media community?

Conversation, which is the essence of communities, somehow gets lost on these platforms.

Traditional forums are a great place for hosting engaging discussions. However, they lack the reach of social media and are not real time.

On the other hand, we have great communication platforms, chatting apps that connect you to people real-time and makes the communication highly engaging and interactive. However, these tools are for smaller groups of people and more personal. You wouldn't WhatsApp a stranger to discuss your favorite book would you? While you can have long intimate conversations on these platforms, they aren't meant for community engagement.

With Scrollback we bridge these three media and give you a platform that has the extensive reach of social media, the engagement and archival abilities of forums and the interactive and real time experience of chat.

Why did we build Scrollback? We built Scrollback because we believe that our users deserve this holistic community experience. We built Scrollback because we felt the need to empower community conversations. Think of the best discussions you have ever had. They were perhaps conversations huddled around a camp fire, or in a classroom full of young passionate students, participating in a social campaign or your last book club meeting. We can’t compete with that but we did built Scrollback to get you as close as we can to that experience.